48h Condensed Tracking Notes

First 24 hours of tracking

I started the tracking at 8AM, October 25th. This was a little earlier than planned. During the first day I spent approximately four hours on digital activitites; and 25 minutes of these were spent on actual social media use. The 25 minutes usage of social media was divided into 17 minutes on Facebook, six minutes on Twitter and two minutes on Instagram.

I spent most of the day at work teaching younger students about the term brainstorming.and the construction of it. For this I use my laptop actively to do a presentation and Q&A sessions. During the small breaks I used my smartphone to check the latest updates on Facebook and Twitter. I have an implemented service on my HTC phone that presents updates from different social sites, for me mainly Twitter and Facebook, in a common and structured collection. A few family members had made some Facebook updates that either involved my name or my picture, or interested me in a way that I wanted to react on it (like it and/or comment on it). A friend had laid a private message for me that I answered as well.

When I got home I turned on my computer and logged into the gaming community service Steam where a couple of my friends were online playing the same game, Infinite Crisis. I decided to join them and we teamed up in the game and through Skype (group call). In the time distributions given above I include Steam and Skype as social media tools and not social media sites.

The last thing I do before focusing on getting some sleep is to through the updates on my primary social media sites that I haven't seen. My primary social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. I have several other social media site accounts, but for now I don't think I get much out of using the additional ones, I guess. Do I get much out of using the primary ones? Uhm. Hmm.

Second 24 hours of tracking

In the morning when writing down notes about this day's first encounter with social media it occured to me that I have a sort of morning ritual that my mind isn't very fund of deviating from. Every morning I go through the updates that I haven't seen on my primary social media sites. I feel mentally unsatisfied if I haven't done this before I eat my breakfast. In some sense I feel left out and not sufficiently updated, just like finding out that someone has been keeping information from you that you would like to know. The difference here being that I don't know beforehand if there is anything at the social media sites that I would like to know, and the lack of knowing seems uncomfortable for me. Thus with non-digital social interaction I presume that I already know what I want to know, and if not, someone will tell me eventually; but with digital social interaction I presume that there is something available 'out there' that I want to know, but don't right now.

This day I was at a meeting in Northern Denmark. I left home at 7:30AM. I was home again at 3PM. During these 7h 30m I didn't check up on social media sites once. The only digital encounters I had was that I read and replied a couple of important e-mails. Then something else occured to me just as another board member put his smartphone in front of me and told me to look at a certain twitter update with a corresponding picture: I can't necessarily blame myself and me alone for the cause of digital encounters I have during a day. Sometimes the cause might fall onto others as well. Interesting. This happened several times during the meeting breaks. When I got home I didn't really have any urge regarding social media sites, although I did go through my primary ones anyway. Later on i visited my parents for a couple of hours. Then it happened again as my mother, and later on my little sister, showed me some things on different social media sites that I just had to see. I wrote down all of the encounters, of course, and it turned out that during this day I spend a total of 20 minutes on facebook of which 15 minutes weren't based on my own initiative.

The rest of this saturday, before I went to bed, I didn't encounter or interact with any social media sites. Other digital activities, e.g. watching TV and playing videogames, is a whole other story.

End of tracking

I've picked up some interesting data by doing this tracking of my own digital activities. Only 48 hours of tracking can and have revealed aspects and things one haven't thought about earlier and maybe wouldn't have thought about otherwise, e.g. habits and routines. I think the tracking has done me good in the sense of getting rich and useful data for later assignments. Furthermore I haven't used as much time on social media sites as I was expecting which makes me a little less worried about the media diet (media fasting) that is to be completed very soon, November 4th to 8th.

My video camera is transferring the recorded video bits to my computer at this very moment. As soon as I have looked it through myself it will be edited and uploaded to this blog.

Tracking Plan

The purpose of this blog entry is to create an estimated tracking plan of how and when I'm going to complete the exercise of tracking my media use for 48 hours. This blog entry describes my specific plan for tracking my media use.

Overall, long-term, plan:

• Brain dumps provide raw data which can be used effectively later on.
• Vlogs provide raw data as well. By using Vlogs, as opposed to brain dumps, I can visually track media use, routines and habits. I plan to put op my old low resolution camera in my living room where I plan to be most of the time in the 48 hours. Whenever I leave the living room I will bring the video camera.
• Fasting for 24 hours. This form of radical media diet is a good way of forcing to distance myself from using digital media, and thereby seeing my own use and general use in different perspective, thus hopefully providing me with rich data to be used later on.
• The time period of my 48 hour tracking is from October 25th at 3PM to October 27th at 3PM.
• I will be logging as much as possible of the digital activities that I will be fasting from later on. This include use of computers, smartphone, e-book readers etc., but will not include the use of TVs and radios.
• I don't want to force myself into a digital activity by having to log the activities on my computer. Therefore I will be logging my digital activities by hand with physical pen and paper. For this I use my research journal that I have made ready for logging timepoints and -periods, activity description, usage description and personal thoughts.

I expect that it'll be difficult for me to log everything that I do regarding digital encounters as I think many of these are habits of mine. Likewise the way of logging and keeping my own digital activities under surveillance seems at first difficult to maintain through 48 hours. However I will do my very best !

Brain Dump #2

Once more I'm trying to think about the last time I engaged in any kind of social media. In a situation like this my way of thinking apparently begins by recalling the first time today I engaged in social media. Then it occurs to me that the last time I engaged in social media was a few minutes ago. This would have taken some time to remember if I were to recall all the times I engaged in social media today - good thing I was overtaken by my own mind on this one.

Just before I was watching TV and sitting with my laptop trying to get updated on the latest news for today while my girlfriend is listening to an audiobook through her earplugs connected to her smartphone. So all in all I am without a doubt surrounded by a vast amount of digital products delivering different kinds of digital content before me. This is when I opened up my Google Chrome browser with the intention of getting updated about contacts, connections, activities, etc. relevant for my social media related life. Thus I opened my browser add-on TweetDeck. This add-on takes care of presenting content from Twitter for in various ways. TweetDeck is of course configured and customized by myself to fit my own needs.

When I decided that I was fairly up to date with the Twitter content available for me I'd sent out a personal tweet, retweeted twice and commented on four tweets. This was for me a very active session, but then again, this week has been filled with extraordinary technology contents because of different announcements by several of the giant technology companies like Apple, Nokia and Microsoft.

Expanded accounts based on condensed accounts #1

This blog entry is the result of my expanded accounts based on my condensed accounts from an exercise about observing a social situation in Aarhus for 15 minutes.

Observations

October 7th. 4:45 PM. I'v located myself in the mall Storcenter Nord in Aarhus. More concrete, 15 meters across the Netto shop. I'm observing the cash registers as the customers buy their chosen groceries and checkout.

The customers are grouped in three lines since three cash registers are in action and ready to handle the customers. Immediately after writing this down they opened a fourth cash register, ready for the customers to group a new line. At this moment most people standing in line have come in pair or with several family members. I saw several children spending time on helping the parents pack the groceries in bags. Typically this took longer time than if the parents were to do it themselves, but they didn't overrule the childrens' dedicated assignments. I was surprised to see this because of the pressure they might've felt based on the many people waiting and making natural noise behind them.

During the short time of 15 minutes I observed a lot of different people doing different things in the process of their checkouts. A guy was checking the receipt for errors while his girlfriend focused on packing up the groceries. It seemed that this was a routine and distribituion of roles that is done every time they shop together, and maybe even individually as well. I observed several of these situations that led me to think of different assumptions, rules, routines and distribution of roles (conscious and unconscious).

Journal

In the beginning I felt confused and awkward because I didn't really think that there were anything important to observe here - isn't it just people shopping? It slowly occured to me through my notes and thoughts that there might be some important things about the way these customers checkout. This makes me that I've fallen under the, according to Spradley, tip-of-the-iceberg-assumption:

"Almost  everyone,  beginning ethnographer  or  experienced  fieldworker  experiences  the  feeling  that  "not  much  is  going  on"  in  a new  social  situation.  Especially  when  doing  micro-ethnography,  we  fall  prey to  this  assumption. We mistake  the  tip  of the  iceberg  for the  entire  mountain of  ice,  nine-tenths  of  which  lies  hidden beneath the  ocean  surface."

It was challenging to observe with no specific focus. Like the interviews we did in the first lecture of this course, it is difficult to know what to search for and what not to. It seems that I feel more comfortable observing with a specific focus in mind, so pretty quick I found myself taking notes primarily about the different kinds of individuals and groups in these checkout lines.

When I left at 5:05 PM the amount of opened cash registers were down to two.